Research Engineer, Safeguards Labs

About the Role

We're hiring research engineers to define and execute the Labs research agenda. You'll scope your own projects, run experiments end-to-end, and decide when an idea is ready to hand off to a production team , or when to kill it and move on.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and contribute to research projects investigating new methods for detecting misuse of Claude, identifying malicious organisations and accounts, strengthening model safeguards, and other safety needs.

• Design and run offline analyses over model usage data to surface abuse patterns, build classifiers and detection systems, and evaluate their effectiveness.

• Develop and iterate on prototypes that could eventually feed signals into the real-time safeguards path, partnering with engineers on tech transfer.

• Contribute to a broader research portfolio investigating methods for detecting abusive behaviour in chat-based or agentive workflows, and for training the model to robustly refrain from dangerous responses or behaviours without over-refusing.

• Build evaluations and methodologies for measuring whether safeguards actually work, including in agentic settings.

• Write up findings clearly so they inform decisions across Trust & Safety, research, and product teams.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have a track record of independently driving research projects from ambiguous problem statements to concrete results, ideally in AI, ML, security, integrity, or a related technical field.

• Are comfortable scoping your own work and switching between research, engineering, and analysis as a project demands.

• Have working familiarity with how large language models operate , sampling, prompting, training , even if LLMs aren't your primary background.

• Are proficient in Python and comfortable working with large datasets.

• Care about the societal impacts of AI and want your work to directly reduce real-world harm.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience building and training machine learning models, including classifiers for abuse, fraud, integrity, or security applications.

• Knowledge of evaluation methodologies for language models and experience designing evals.

• Experience with agentic environments and evaluating model behaviour in them.

• Background in trust and safety, integrity, fraud detection, threat intelligence, or adversarial ML.

• Experience with red teaming, jailbreak research, or interpretability methods like steering vectors.

• A history of taking research prototypes and transferring them into production systems.

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits

• Optional equity donation matching

• Generous vacation and parental leave

• Flexible working hours

• Lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues

Visa Sponsorship

• We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.